A Bomb In the Head

Copyright 1986 David E. Cortesi

He towered over me on my cart and peered down through his hair. "I have a bomb in my head," he confided. I chopped the back of his left knee and, when he knelt, I reached up and slammed a thumb into his right ear and poked my forefinger into the corner of his mouth.

"There, I've inserted the dampers. You can't go off." His face melted in relief. "Now, give. I sent you to follow a man. Did you?"

He nodded carefully. "Tidy man, black suit, hat. He went to New York," he said, his diction slightly hampered by my finger. "I followed him. I had the debit card you gave me, so I could follow him onto the train."

"You didn't ride in the same car with him?" I've spent a long time drilling my people in the rudiments of the work, but I'm never sure it will stick.

"No, no, no, I took the next car back of him, it was second class but not too crowded. I was right there on the platform when he got off. I was 'way back; he didn't see me and I followed him right on up."

I could picture the two of them -- the impeccable clerk I hoped to stick with adultery and the scrawny hairball I'd set to following him -- in the concourse of the restored Grand Central Station. Though it would make no more than a cozy alcove of MidAmerica, it was a big, busy place. "So how did he lose you?"

"He didn't. I stayed right with him, right out onto the street." He looked at me pleadingly. "Hey, I used to live in New York, did you know?"

"Yes, kid, I know. You followed the man and what happened?"

His face screwed up around my finger. I put my arms around him and he hugged me frantically, almost lifting me off my cart.

"It's all right, Woody, easy, kid, put me down." I hate losing stump contact with something solid. "Now come on, what did the creep do?"

The creep, it seemed, had gone only a few blocks, straight into the crush and smell of a Manhattan street market. There he'd spoken at length with a crippled flower vendor.

"Were they dickering?" Consorting with prostitutes wasn't the sin I'd contracted to prove, but it would serve. "Did he pay her?"

Woody nodded, then remembered his bomb and braced his head with both hands. "He gave her something and they went into her booth." He stopped to sniff. Tears were leaking steadily from the corners of his eyes. I knew the symptoms; he had to cry quietly for fear of jiggling his head. My man was near to being put out of action; in all likelihood he'd spend the next week doped to the eyeballs in a public health ward before they kicked him back out. Before he stepped around that bend, I wanted to know what had pushed him. Something told me it was important.

"That's great, kid, great; that's what I expected. What happened when he came out?"

Woody had gotten close to the creep while he was talking to the vendor. That wasn't good technique, but in the hubbub of a market it was safe enough. He meant to drift by and wait beyond the booth, so the mark wouldn't pass him if, as seemed likely, he turned back toward Grand Central when he emerged.

But the space beyond the booth was vacant. He'd turned into it. The canvas stopped short of the ground: the bottom of the booth's walls was a row of rusty buckets that, Woody supposed, held water and bundles of flowers. He'd looked up: the winter sky was hazy, so he'd cast no shadow on the canvas. He'd leaned down and peered up past dented metal and green stems.

And seen a murder done.

For a long time I couldn't get him off the smoothness of the creep's move, the practice it suggested. He'd eased the briefcase to the ground and come up holding a short length of pipe, its butt wrapped in a cloth. The vendor, a black woman with one arm, had bent aside, probably to unfasten her skirt. The creep's swings were apparently quick, flexible, athletic -- Woody whispered "like baseball" a few dozen times until I got him off it. The pipe was dropped, the cloth went into the case, the creep was gone.

Woody was too street-wise to involve himself in a corpse. He'd wandered a while, then taken the train back to me.

"All the way back I had to talk to the bomb. I whispered to it on the train, but I had to shout at it here."

"You did just perfect, kid, perfect," I told him, "You saw something really bad but it wasn't your badness, and you handled it just right --" and so forth in this vein until I had him sailing at nearly his usual list and could send him out to queue up for a meal and a bed. I felt guilty as hell. But how could I have known, when I sent him out, that my poor freak was tailing a Perfectionist?

The pneumatic railroad system, the web of great clean evacuated tubes that plunge on geodesic lines through the world's crust, was the last great public work that Earth attained to. After it, the best and brightest of humankind moved out to the orbital arcologies and left the rest to stew. Once I was one of those smug, shining people. I helped to police the elegant structures we built in vacuum; helped enforce the laws that let only certifiably perfect specimens emigrate up from Earth. We called the rest, Scum: a word linked to our image of the home planet as a rotten, mold-draped fruit.

Then a weightless object that massed several tonnes drifted gently across my thighs and brushed my legs away. I doubt it was an accident; if there is such a thing as justice I will someday meet the one that launched it. But by the time I was in charge of myself again, I had other problems. An acquired imperfection isn't the same as a genetic one -- but try explaining that to the backs of peoples' heads. The only faces I saw were guarded ones that urged me to unmigrate. Wouldn't I be happier where I could, um, be with my own kind? Finally I had to admit that any country is better than Coventry.

So I went down to Earth and, finding no place on its surface, kept going down, into the bowels of the global railways. There, in the crevices of society, among the wackos and crips and incompetents and weirds, I found a place. It wasn't much: geographically, no more than an ungrudged spot beside a shoe-shine booth on the main concourse. There I could park my cart, sell pencils, observe, and meet my people. Financially, it was small retainers from divorce lawyers and private detectives who found that my people could often pass unremarked where no one else could. Socially -- I took care of my people. The ones who were capable of gratitude, felt it.

Now, by accident, I'd run into the vilest of the pathologies we'd inherited from the departing spacers: the flake whose concern for the race had gotten cross-wired with his own libido, the independent improver of the human gene pool. I dumped my pencils into my pack and scooted off to get my legs.

My prostheses are the finest -- because the only -- ones offered by the Illinois Public Health services. They serve to hold my shoulders high enough to let the crutches slip under them. With them, I walk slightly better than the average three-legged stool. I use my cart when I want to get someplace fast, but without legs or a chair, you can't get high enough to see into a public phone.

Like the one in which I faced the cigar-end of Donna Bramanga, attorney at law. "You got my dirty snapshots, Wallace?" She wanted to know. "What's my client's soon-to-be-ex husband doing when he skips work? I mean who?"

"He's a cripple-basher, Donna."

"He's a what?"

"A roach-rubber. A slug-stomper."

"What's that, Upstairs talk? I don't know what you're trying to tell me." But she could tell I was serious; her cigar was going like a flashlight.

"He takes the train to anywhere, heads for the seamy part of town, finds a cripple or freako, kills it, and slides home showing all his teeth in a big grin."

There was a long pause. "You know this?"

"I have an eye-witness."

"One of your wackos?"

"What's the matter, Donna? This is even better than adultery, isn't it? You'd have a divorce like a shot."

She covered her eyes. "It isn't the divorce, you fool, it's the settlement. Convicts are wards of the state; it takes their property to pay their keep, plus in jail he won't have a salary for support payments. If that turd is convicted of what you say, he's judgement-proof." She rubbed her eyes. "So do you have proof?"

"Just the witness."

"Pictures, travel records? A corpse?"

"Not with me, no. According to the national police blotter file, a corpse of the right size bearing the right damage was collected this afternoon. I'm sure I could get more, now I know his pattern."

"Oh no, thank you very much." She considered me. "I'll pay you for your time, um, plus a bonus. And I'll, um, I'll speak to some of my friends, have 'em send you some work. Good enough? And you forget about this guy."

"Forget him?" I leaned as far toward the screen as my crutches would let me; the motors in my knees hummed. "Lady, I want him arrested. He's a psychopath; he's killed no telling how many."

She gave me a big cheerful smile. "Wallace, that's fine, you used to be a policeman, you can still do that stuff, incredible in your condition, that's terrific. You keep your eye on this guy for, let's say, a week. I can get a good settlement in a week. Then you can have him. Just let it ride for a week, and you can have him."

Ah. Suddenly I could see the vision in her head: the polished desk, the leather chairs. Bramanga, the judge, the creep, the wife, meeting to finalize the settlement in a sudden, uncontested divorce action. The judge looks up surprised, asks the creep if he agrees to these terms? "Oh sure," Bramanga would say around her cigar, "he agrees. Just like we talked about on the phone last night, isn't that right?" On the phone, when she would have dropped just enough of a hint to let the creep think she knew more about his field trips than she really did. But she was honest for a lawyer; she'd only blackmail him on her client's account. Probably.

But even a little blackmail would put him off his game -- and with the sudden departure of his family obligations, he might change his patterns. He'd certainly change his address. I'd never see him again.

I forced myself to smile back at her. "Okay, a week. I guess I'll need it to get him all set up anyway. But don't make me wait any longer; I want this creep." Oh, Wallace, you tiger, you.

We signed off in a cross-fire of false smiles.

"Slug, it's Wallace. Let me in, please?" It was dark, there was an echoing gulf behind me and loose rubble under my crutches and plastic feet. There was a brief hum above me: a camera on a servo head?

A hundred feet below there was a light. From two hundred up and to the right, I heard a long, hysterical giggle. A cold drop smacked my forehead as I looked toward it. Then a flat, electronic voice near my ear said "One. Sec. Pal."

The concourse of MidAmerica Transfer is a vast, domed, cylindrical space through which millions of people pass each week. Do as many as six ever stop to consider that this polished marble drum must have a thickness, a structure? Yet it has: a tall, narrow torus of darkness furnished with structural steel, rough plaster, nests of re-bar; bounded by dripping cliffs of Illinois basement rock; banded by catwalks. Some thousands of people call it home, including my friends Slug and Snail.

There was a snick and a dim red light came on to show me a low door. The doorway had been hacked into a metal wall. Steel jambs had been tacked down around it by someone who was no craftsman with a torch. It wasn't pretty, but I knew it was secure, the common shell of two very tender gastropods.

There was only standing room in the tiny vestibule. Beyond, the floor rose to waist height. I leaned back onto the ledge and shed my hardware: leaving legs and crutches standing to wiggle into a glossy burrow. The floor and walls were of hardened foam, the floor warm on my stumps as I knuckled over it. Spaces opened at random, there were pillows everywhere, and each niche had a different texture. It was a place for people who spent a lot of time on the floor.

I swung into the den: a mirror-ball turned inside out, a polyhedron whose inner faces were display screens. In the center Slug reclined in an inflatable chair, draped with wires. He waved the forearm he controlled; the other posed over his wracked body like a model of a derrick. I looked over his shoulder as I started the back rub that was our ritual greeting.

"(16, Mandrake) is the slug still here?" one of his network correspondents wrote on the screen.

"(16, Zyzzyx) haven't seen him in a while." typed another.

"Later, folk," typed Slug. I could hear the apparatus clicking between his teeth. "My masseur is here <grin rub>"

"(16, Mandrake) lucky sluggo" responded one, and "(16, Bear) Wish I waz rich" said another. More messages flowed up the screen, but Slug had switched his tongue control from the keyboard to his voice.

"Long Time Wall Ass." said the voice from the air. "High Air Please. Ooh Fin Gers."

"That's right, spoil him." Snail, a gamin redhead, rolled into the room from another tunnel, belly-down on an old skateboard, propelling herself with deft thrusts of her flippers. "That's all I'll hear about for days, is fingers."

"Puh Tee In Your Hanz."

"Good," I said. "Help me catch a killer."

"Really?" asked Snail eagerly, "Not just a dumb skip-trace?"

"What Do You Have Now."

"Worse, a Perfectionist. Slug, all I have is his picture, his work address in the Loop, and his hours. That's all my principal gave me; it was enough to spot and follow him when he went out for a lunch and a little mayhem."

"Add Ress." Slug's arm waved at a keyboard.

"I'll take the picture," said Snail, and lipped it from my fingers as I held it out. By the time I'd finished typing the address, the creep's face, coarsened by digitizing, had appeared on one of the monitors overhead. Not long after, company names began to appear on another: Slug's program was skimming a Chicago business directory, selecting names with that building's address. A few minutes after each appeared, it was joined by a string of digits: an IRS employer number. Soon a burst of names began to roll up another monitor.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Wor Kers."

"That's my clever Slug," commented Snail, wiggling onto the couch beside him. "See what he's done?"

"He's tapped the IRS, and I'm leaving."

"Puh Bleek Rec Urdz."

"You bet, we don't fool with the feds. But most of what a company files with the IRS the State wants too, and a lot of that is public record. If you know where it is. These names are from unemployment insurance files, selected by employer numbers. But where will you get pictures, lover?"

"Come You Ter Badge."

"Of course, oh you are so sneaky!" She hugged her roommate.

"I don't see it."

"You can't enter the business district at rush hour without a city commuter badge, showing you paid your transit tax. The badges have pictures, the pictures are in the computer. Some computer. We'll find it." She eyed me. "It'll be a while, sport. Meanwhile, there's more than one back around here could use rubbing."

Snail said "That's him!" as I yelled "Stop!" The parade of blocky i.d. photos stopped, leaving one beside the picture Bramanga had given me. Now we had a photo, a name, an employer, and a social security number. From these, we could learn anything there was to be known about the creep, except possibly why he had done what he did in New York. Or maybe that was there, too.

"Slug, just for curiosity..." and I reeled off from memory the network address of the Orbital Emigration Authority. "Yes, good. Select applicant status." The tongue control rattled. "Say yes; say yes; say no. Type his SSN. Uh-huh, bingo."

The creep had a standing application to emigrate Upstairs. He renewed it monthly, paying a stiff fee for each renewal. I knew those fees; we used to dangle losers on a string as long as we could, extracting fees that made a comfortable plus in our budget. "The sucker."

"Why a sucker?"

"See under eye color?"

"What's wrong with hazel eyes? I have hazel eyes."

"OEA would sure say you have, sweets. An applicant with a prayer of going up has eyes of blue, green, or brown. Somebody they'll never, never let up, but who they don't want to let down too hard, is entered as azure, hazel or umber instead. When you call, they shunt you to the special reps who butter you up."

"Not Nice."

"This guy they can mug as often as they like. But I don't see how to get him."

"Fall Oh And Catch With Red Handz."

"That's just it, Slug -- red hands are more than a metaphor with this guy. He goes out for jollies from his office, but not every day. What days? I had Woody staking him for a week before he went out. And then where? On the railroad, he can go a long way in an afternoon. And while I believe Woody, no cop would -- at least not enough to tail a solid citizen on his story alone."

"And if we don't catch him on his next run, somebody else dies?"

"I'm afraid so. I just wish there was some way we could get him to perform at a known time and place."

Snail looked at me steadily. "I know a way."

"No." said Slug's electronic voice. "No. No Dice. No Way. No."

Chilly air puffed by and a flake of snow settled on my sleeve. "Pretty nice place," puffed Mister Teeth, looking around in the shadowy cement skeleton. A breeze rattled the canvas walls of vendors' booths. I looked back. His breath steamed as he drove the shopping cart -- in which I reclined -- up the motionless glideway from the depths of the St. Louis depot.

"You like this? I must show you the Jersey shore someday." As with most older rail stations, the shaft of the one in St. Louis had been capped with an immense, gaunt parking structure through which all its traffic passed. Now busses and taxis looped the ground floor amid the usual street market, while the upper floors were the unheated, unsanitary roosts of the otherwise homeless. "What could you possibly like about it?"

"A tight roof, man, and no cops. Over there?" He nodded into the dimness beyond a cab rank, where I could see dark figures around the glow of a fire. "In Seattle, Phoenix, most places they come down quick if you light a fire. But here; smell? That's been burning a while. Wonder where they get wood?"

"I don't want to know. The whole place makes me twitch. We want a booth just over there, where the people off the busses turn down the ramp. Let's find out who we have to grease, and git."

Thanks to Slug and Snail, I knew everything the public record had to say about Prentice Dillon Wellingham, psychotic killer of St. Louis, Mississippi Region, North American Union. And a bit more. Slug used the computer net for society and to feed his prisoned mind, scrupulously avoiding any hint of UDR -- the felony of Unauthorized Data Retrieval. But when Snail dealt herself in, Slug began to bend rules. Now I had a number that I could dial from any public phone. When I did, the screen would light with the last sixteen interactions that Wellingham had had with any credit system, anywhere. I could see when he got on a bus or train and when he got off, when he used a public toilet, when he bought a paper. In a day I knew his route to work: two busses in St. Louis, the train to MidAmerica, surface train into Chicago.

That night Mr. Teeth and I rented a market booth he'd have to pass; at dawn we were back, a flotilla of shopping carts, to stock it with flowers. And with an impudent, phocomelic vendor with red hair and hazel eyes.

"Bouquet for your girl friend, mister?"

"Did you see him?"

"You could tie it on that nice crutch, cheer you up."

"Did he see you?"

"Maybe; I waved at him. Buy or move on, I got my rent to earn."

That night, the flow of upward commuters was pinched between the line of booths and two bag ladies in colossal argument over the custody of a shopping cart. No: bag persons; Eugenia is no lady and Blanche seems somehow beyond notions of gender.

"What did he say?"

"Violets, hey; buncha violets!"

"Damnit, I saw his lips move."

"It wasn't nice. Hey, violets here!"

"Snail, answer me!"

She looked at me. "He called me some things, immoral scum was one I recall, then he spit at me. But it was all real private, as if he couldn't hold it in but still didn't want to be noticed. He is a mean man, Wallace."

"He's as witless and as deadly as a train wreck. I will be back shortly." And I went to rob a railroad security man and call my bent cosmetologist.

With Mr. Teeth for muscle, I preempted the only working pay phone in the St. Louis Depot's upper levels and settled down. Slug called at two AM.

"Heez In A Cab."

"That's fine. Call me when he gets out again."

"Heel Be There Then Dam It"

"No, he won't." And of course, he wasn't. He left one cab, walked blocks, took another, left it, walked, took a third.

"This should be the last leg. I'll go get ready."

"Pleez Be Care Full Pleez."

"He won't touch her, I swear."

"He Does And You Die Wall Ass."

Brave words, bravely meant on both sides. Yet despite all my care I nearly blew it, nearly lost our precious bait, through the simplest of errors: expecting sense from a maniac.

He came easing down the ramp, casual among the scattered strollers (people on their way home from a night out in Old Saint Loo, the city-run red light district). From my peephole under the counter, I wondered where he would carry the pipe club, lacking a briefcase. Up a sleeve of his jacket? Yes, in the last steps before our booth I spotted the stiffness of the left arm. A bus pulled out in the distance and masked the brief conversation over my head. All Snail would say later was "He was very direct."

Our scenario played out to plan for several seconds: the dicker, the agreement, and Snail's retreat. She was in a light chair, and needed only to tug on a line strung beside it to roll herself back to the curtained rear half of the booth. At that point the curtain was supposed to swing over her and, in the seconds it took the creep to come around the counter and lift it again, Woody would pull her another meter, out the back of the booth, out of danger. Then I'd pop the sleep grenade I'd stolen from a security man, and the lights would go out for the creep, alone and out of sight.

I think now that the plan derailed on the creep's own realization of the extent of Snail's disability: he'd expected her to walk away from the counter. Who knows what connections arced in his mind when he comprehended her truncated torso? One of his hands slapped the counter -- the fingers curled, white with pressure, around the edge of the board just above my head -- and the other snatched at the clothesline (a few inches of the pipe slipping out from the cuff) as if to pull the chair back. The rope jerked from under Snail's abbreviated arm and the chair, jostled askew, stopped. The curtain lapped against it but didn't close. Tableau for the eternity of a heartbeat.

Then the creep stepped around the counter-end. Possessed, he moved with the slippery grace of a predatory animal: his head sweeping around to see if anyone was watching; one arm flicking the length of pipe out into his hand; one foot rising to push Snail's chair into the dark behind the curtain; the other arm reaching up to draw the curtain around them. I almost froze, looking up at this performance from beside his thigh.

As he brought the curtain around I rolled the grenade under it and began to swarm up his trunk like a monkey on a tree. Sleep gas takes effect in seconds, they say. I swear we struggled, panted, hissed curses for hours, but eventually we toppled over the chair into darkness. I recall being delighted, as my wits faded out, at the amount of effort he'd wasted in trying to kick my legs out from under me.

"Oh Jeez You Guys. What. Then. What. Then."

"What then, Slug, is that we all went to sleep. When the booth stopped wiggling like a sack of cats, Woody and Mr. Teeth held their noses and opened the back to air it out. Then they tied up the creep, and Doctor Robert came and did what I hired him for. By the time Snail and I woke up, he was done and gone."

"And The Eye Browz."

"Gone, yes. It was the most benign disfigurement I could figure out: permanent depilation of his eyebrows. If he has a scrap of sanity left on the subject, he'll survive it."

But he hadn't, and didn't. Two days later Woody -- hands not bracing his head but easy at his sides -- brought me word that Slug's watchdog on the national blotter file had found it: an unimportant suicide in St. Louis.

"See, Woody," I told him, "Everyone has a bomb in his head. You just have to find the fuse."